With the development of mobile broadband communications, mobile telephony and voice services are ever evolving from third generation (3G) to long term evolution (LTE) services using the same communication networks. Prior to LTE services, voice data was transmitted using circuit switched (CS) networks, by contrast LTE services use Internet Protocol (IP)-based service and Voice over LTE (VoLTE) services are likely to become more prevalent. In short, an Evolved Packed Core (EPC) network may be required to handle traditional data services such as web browsing, video transfer/streaming, and applications, but also, such networks may be required to carry voice data.
Customers of wireless services have come to expect a certain level of performance from their service providers. In order to ensure consistent high quality of service, service providers employ network monitoring/network analytics software suites customized for the service providers. Ideally, service providers would like to be able to offer perfect communications service, free from dropped calls, corrupted video, or wait time (latency) between the time a cell phone user speaks and when a recipient hears the spoken voice. In order to ensure high quality of communications service, a service provider may need to install more cells/antennas, increase transmission power of the cells/antennas, or alter the beam properties of the transmitting antennas (e.g. beam width, azimuth, tilt, etc.) It is impossible to monitor and analyze yet-to-be implemented services to determine what problems, if any, will be encountered upon their respective launches.
Consumers of voice services generally prefer well operating systems characterized by few dropped calls and high scores in other Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), such as high Radio Access Network (RAN) Accessibility, high RAN Retainability, and high channel/voice quality. While it is desirable that carriers/voice service providers prioritize voice data so that there is little latency in messaging and few dropped calls, etc., there is a need to optimize networks prior to implementation of a future service.